1. Field
The present disclosure is directed to a method and apparatus for network traffic control. More particularly, the present disclosure is directed to biasing of network node packet prioritization based on packet content.
2. Introduction
Presently, information can be sent from a source to a destination over the Internet by breaking data into packets. These packets often travel through multiple intermediate nodes before being reassembled at the destination where the exact path from source to destination may vary due to the amount of network traffic and other factors. Unfortunately, some packets may encounter excessive delays if traffic is heavy at an intermediate node. As a result of these delays, some packets may arrive too late at a destination or may even be dropped at a node before reaching the destination. This can be especially problematic for multimedia applications which have stringent requirements on time bounded parameters. For example, Internet phones that use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can be especially sensitive to extensive packet delays, which can result in poor communication over such a phone when packets are excessively delayed. Video services are also sensitive to extensive packet delays, which can cause distorted or unintelligible video when packets are excessively delayed or dropped.
As a further example, providing end to end Quality of Service (QoS) is a key challenge for today's tactical networks, particularly for supporting multimedia applications due to their stringent requirements on time bounded parameters such as delay, jitter, and other parameters. Such multimedia applications have diverse requirements on network services. In the existing Differentiated Services (DiffServ) framework, applications, such as video applications, at edge nodes can estimate network congestion and try to adapt to the congestion level by adjusting transmission rates. Also, sophisticated video compression schemes, such as ITU-T H.263, H.264 and ISO/IEC MPEG-4, extensively utilize data dependency of video signals, which can result in packets with contents of unequal importance. However, network nodes do not know the relative importance of the packet to the application. As a result, important packets are dropped and delayed as much as packets of lesser importance.
Thus, there is a need for a method and apparatus for biasing of network node packet prioritization based on packet content.